As a multiple synth/keyboard player, with aspirations to gigging*, one thing that is a pain in the neck is managing changing sounds.
One option is to make a list of songs and settings, like this song use preset 45, that song use custom setting 8, some other song 36A. Fine providing you can QUICKLY select the sound. Not so great when you have a keyboard with only up/down controls, and if you have a keyboard with “only” a numeric display and no name display you don’t have a “double check”.
Related option is before a gig set up user/custom sounds in the order required, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc… Fine except you’re constantly re-programming the keyboards, and if someone decides to swap songs around you’re doomed. Feeding into your own mixer before the main mixer is handy then as you can pull your level to zero, quickly auditioning sounds on your monitor output on headphones before bringing your output up again. Clumsy.
Another method I’ve tried once, have some external device (e.g. iPad with a MIDI interface) and software to send program changes. This worked reasonably well, but did involve a lot of cables in addition to the not exactly cheap hardware (e.g I had an iPad, MIDI interface, PSU for interface, iPad-USB cable, two MIDI cables on top of everything else)
So why not get a device that is designed for the job? Annoyingly it seems when MIDI was in its heyday these things existed and could be purchased, often, I gather, as some sort of “electronic patch bay” to change MIDI interconnections. But now?
Enter discovering there were (now) UK suppliers of Arduino.
This project has actually been planned and vaguely started for a while (have some of the larger components) but I’ll try and backtrack and produce notes, catching up so this becomes a sort of documentary on the project.
As the saying goes… watch this space…
B.
* I have played gigs, just not many, for reasons I won’t go into here.